Category Archives: during treatment

your voices: carrie and hodgkin’s lymphoma

November 1, 2011 By in chemotherapy, during treatment, your voices Tags: , , , 5 Comments

This is the first in a series of personal experiences with food and cancer – your experiences, your voices. It’s one thing for me to tell you my opinion, what I see and hear as an oncologist. It’s another thing entirely to hear from people who have gone through it, learned from it, and lived to tell about it. Carrie is starting us off.

Carrie Winegarden is a 27 year old woman living in the San Francisco Bay Area who blogs about technology, the internet, reading, fitness,
food, and cancer at CarrieActually.com.

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In November 2009 I was in pain. I took several days off of work because it hurt to get dressed in anything other than my soft and stretchy pajamas and I was so exhausted that I didn’t bother adjusting myself to Daylight Savings Time and was perfectly happy going to bed at 8pm. The day before Thanksgiving I called my doctor’s advice line because I had a bruisey lump on my chest that was only getting worse after a couple weeks and it had hurt to laugh with my sister who was home for college for the holiday. The advice nurse scheduled an appointment for me the day after Thanksgiving. At that appointment I was sent for a CT scan, and I was told I had a tumor but because it was a holiday weekend I had to wait until the next week for a biopsy to see if it was cancerous or not.

That was the longest holiday weekend ever.

Early in December I was diagnosed with stage 3B Hodgkin’s
Lymphoma and started chemotherapy (8 cycles of ABVD to be completed in May 2010).

The cancerous Reed-Sternberg cell (the double cell in the middle) in Hodgkin Lymphoma.

I think most of my tastebuds died, and water in particular tasted particularly metallic and awful which lead to needing bags and bags of saline along with my chemotherapy to combat dehydration. Before chemotherapy I liked only foods that were bland, sweet, or salty but over the course of my treatment I developed a taste for strong and spicy flavors – hot peppers, pungent cheeses, and loads of garlic became normal for me.

My birthday is in April and that year my family and closest friends were particularly grateful that I was able to celebrate a birthday at all. We went out for fondue because cheeses and rich chocolates were flavors I could taste and especially enjoy.

The hardest thing about eating was sometimes just getting to the food. There were days when I woke up so weak and dizzy that I didn’t even trust myself to be able to get down the stairs from my bed to the kitchen and had to call my mom (who thankfully lives just a couple miles away) to come over and bring food up the stairs to me. The thing that most helped me enjoy my food was to take the time to plate it nicely on real dishes and sit at the table. It makes the eating much more about the experience and less about the food.

My veins burned from my chemotherapy medication so it had to be administered very slowly and a session would often take 6 to 8 hours. My mom came with me to most sessions and we’d often pack a lunch and snacks for me but she’d only bring a granola bar for herself – we should have made sure she packed herself a complete lunch too.

caring for the caregiver: a gift of food

October 25, 2011 By in caregivers, during treatment Tags: , , 2 Comments

During the cancer diagnosis and treatment, the focus is very much on the patient, the one going through the work-up, the biopsies, the chemotherapy or radiation, the surgery, the side effects. But often, there is someone else who may be just as affected by the diagnosis and treatment — the caregiver.

It’s rare that I see a new patient, someone with a new diagnosis of cancer, who comes alone to the first visit with me. There is usually a very concerned wife or husband – or a best friend, a child, a sister or a brother, a church member – sitting right beside his or her loved one, holding their hand or patting their knee, ready with a notebook and pen to write down the important details of the cancer that I’m about to share. And, without fail, that same caregiver is at almost all the visits to come, all the appointments for chemotherapy and beyond.

And, while it’s never intentional, it is easy for the caregiver to be forgotten along the way. The attention is necessarily – and rightly so – focused on the person who is dealing with cancer, but the caregiver is generally carrying quite a heavy load. The caregivers I’ve encountered are often silent, going through the experience without complaining. It seems intuitive, but medical literature tells us that caregivers are more likely to become ill themselves, have higher rates of depression and insomnia, have more emotional stress and financial burden.

It’s not uncommon — in fact, I’d say it’s VERY common — for caregivers to neglect themselves while caring for their loved one. They may stop exercising. They may not get enough sleep. And often, they don’t focus on eating healthy — or eating at all. It’s just not a priority. Just ask my mother – she’s been known to eat potato chips for dinner while caregiving for my father and my grandmother recently.

If you’d like to help out a friend with cancer, I’d encourage you to think about doing something special for his or her caregiver as well. A simple gift of a homemade meal will not only provide a nourishing alternative to fast food or a peanut butter sandwich, but it will also lift up their spirits and nourish the soul.

I’ve listed a few recipe ideas below for meals that should be easy to make ahead and are freezer-friendly. Just remember to package up the meal in disposable pans to minimize any clean-up. Your task is to make the caregiver’s life easier, not make her spend an hour washing dishes afterward. Now, go forth and cook!

i’m on chemo and food doesn’t taste right…what can I do?

October 3, 2011 By in chemotherapy, during treatment, taste changes Tags: , 13 Comments

This is the first in a series of questions I plan to answer, all surrounding how better to enjoy food despite cancer and the cancer treatment process. I welcome feedback or suggestions, so please leave a comment if you have anything to share.

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The taste of foods often changes for people undergoing chemotherapy. This doesn’t happen to everyone receiving chemotherapy as part of cancer treatment, but it certainly happens to a lot. I’ve seen it happen as early as the first dose of chemotherapy, and it’s become my practice to warn people about this side effect. Foods that you used to love may now taste awful, and slightly sweetened foods may now taste sickeningly sweet. Food may taste metallic or bland and like cardboard. Not only can this side effect can lead to decreased appetite, weight loss, and malnutrition, but alterations in taste can dramatically decrease our ability to simply enjoy eating food, something that is critical to our quality of life as humans.

We aren’t sure why this side effect happens, but there is medical literature to suggest that changes in both the sense of smell and the sense of taste occur with various chemotherapy drugs. The sense of smell is heavily tied into our sense of taste, so an alteration in either can really mess things up. If you’ve ever had a bad cold and couldn’t taste your food properly, you have some idea of what this is like.

The unfortunate thing is that there is nothing that can prevent this taste alteration or solve the problem once it’s started. But, there are strategies that can be tried to get around it. Most importantly is to experiment with different foods. It may be that foods that you used to enjoy are now unpalatable. If that’s the case, branch out of your comfort zone and try foods with a different flavor profile. Experimentation is critical to finding foods that work and that you can still enjoy.

Many find that very spicy foods or dishes with a lot of heat in them are best during this time. Try foods from another culture – Asian foods or Indian foods, for example. Add extra spices to boost flavor. Marinate chicken, pork, or beef to increase the flavor in the protein. If food has a metallic taste, use plastic or bamboo utensils.

The most important rule is to just keep trying. You’ll find something that will work.

Here are a few suggested recipes to try:

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